“Wait a minute. You ain’t on their side?”
The blacksmith snorted in contempt.
“That son of a bitch Reynolds came into the shop and clouted me on the head when I wasn’t lookin’,” he said. “Knocked me out and dragged me into the back so he could hide there and get the drop on you, mister. When I came to and realized what was goin’ on, I went out the back door and ran around to the cafe to get some help. Larry loaned me a Greener.”
“Then you ain’t friends with this lowdown bunch?” Scratch asked.
“Not by a long shot!” the counterman exclaimed. “They’ve been comin’ into town, gettin’ drunk, and causin’ trouble for months now. They’ve shot up the place and hoorawed folks more than once.”
“Then why didn’t you get the law on them, or do somethin’ about it yourselves?”
Both men shrugged.
“We’re not gunfighters,” the blacksmith said. “They’re probably not really good enough to call them by that name, either, but they’re slicker on the draw and better with their guns than anybody else around here.”
“And as for the law,” the counterman put in, “there’s a deputy sheriff who comes out this way from Fort Worth every now and then, but Reynolds and his friends were always on their best behavior when he was around. He wasn’t of a mind to do anything about it.”
Scratch began to see that he and Cara had done these folks a favor by gunning down Reynolds and the other three wild cowboys. This wasn’t the first time he had seen an entire town treed by a bunch of self-proclaimed badmen, and it probably wouldn’t be the last.
“All right,” he said as he holstered his left-hand Remington and started reloading the other gun. “Two of these fellas are shot up but still alive. You got a doctor around here who can take a look at ’em?”
The counterman nodded and said, “Somebody’s already gone to fetch Doc Steward. He’ll be here directly.”
“The other two need buryin’.”
“We can take care of that,” the blacksmith said. “I build coffins, too.”
“I saw that you changed the shoe on that horse before Reynolds buffaloed you.”
The blacksmith nodded. “That’s right. I’d just finished up the job when the son of a bitch came in.”
“What do we owe you?”
The man shook his head.
“Not a blamed thing, mister,” he declared. “We’re square. It’s worth the cost of a horseshoe and a little labor to get that bunch cleaned up. Now O’Bar can go back to bein’ a nice, friendly place to live.”
Scratch grunted. You never could tell how things were going to work out. No matter how much you thought you knew, life still held plenty of surprises.
He supposed he wouldn’t want it any other way.
He finished reloading his guns and turned to Cara, who stood in the doorway of the blacksmith shop holding Reynolds’s rifle, still looking like she really wanted to shoot somebody.
“We’d better be movin’ on,” he told her. “And we’ll leave that rifle here.”
“Yeah, I don’t reckon we need it now,” she said as she leaned it against a wall of the shop. “But it sure came in handy for a minute.”
“It did,” Scratch agreed. He led the horses out of the barnlike building, and they both swung up into their saddles.
More of O’Bar’s citizens had emerged. Some of them were carrying the corpses over to the side of the blacksmith shop while another man set a black doctor’s bag down next to one of the wounded men and knelt beside him to check on the wound. That would be the local sawbones, Scratch thought.
He lifted a hand in farewell to the blacksmith and the counterman from the Red Top as he and Cara rode out of the settlement. The townsmen returned the wave.
Cara followed a trail that dipped down to cross a wooden bridge over the creek, then climbed to go past the church Scratch had spotted earlier.
“Where are we headed now?” he asked.
“We’ll camp between here and Weatherford,” she said. “Then tomorrow we’ll cut north of there and make for the hills where the hideout is. We ought to be there by late afternoon.” She grinned over at him. “And then we’ll be rich.”
“Can’t be soon enough to suit me,” Scratch said. He was glad to be closing in on the end of this deception.
Now all he had to do was hope that Bo and Brubaker would be able to hold up their end of the deal.
On their way to Gainesville, Brubaker had predicted that the county sheriff was going to give them trouble about locking up the prisoners, and he was right. The man had complained bitterly about having to feed and house federal prisoners out of his jail budget.
“Write a letter to Judge Parker at Fort Smith and take it up with him,” Brubaker had told the sheriff in his usual blunt manner. “Maybe he’ll reimburse you for the cost.”
The lawman had gone along with that, finally, and transferred Lowe, Elam, and Early Nesbit under heavy guard into cells. As Bo and Brubaker rode away, Bo on Early’s horse, the Texan asked, “What do you think the chances are that Judge Parker will cover those expenses for the sheriff?”
Brubaker snorted. “Slim and none,” he said. “The judge is thrifty to a fault. He’ll tell the sheriff to take it up with the Justice Department, and we know how often things actually get done in Washington. No, he’ll never get any of that county money back, but that ain’t my worry. All I’m concerned about is recapturing Cara LaChance and recovering all that stolen loot.” Brubaker shook his head. “I still say I never should’ve let you and Morton talk me into this. No good’s gonna come of it.”
“We’ll see,” Bo said.
They had left the wagon at a stable in Gainesville, since they would need it when they returned to pick up Lowe and Elam. Brubaker planned to leave Early Nesbit locked up there long enough to let him get to Tyler with his prisoners, and then the local law could let Nesbit go as far as he was concerned.
From Gainesville they rode south to Denton and spent the night there, then angled southwest toward Decatur and Weatherford.
The Cross Timbers was nice enough country in the summer, Bo thought, with its wooded hills, wide valleys, and abundance of creeks. Right now, though, in the middle of winter and with this part of Texas suffering through a terrible drought as well, all the vegetation was dead. The landscape was parched and ugly. If it was like that farther west, where the terrain was more rugged to start with, things were going to be pretty harsh.
Brubaker addressed that issue by asking, “What’s this country like where we’re goin’?”
“Rough,” Bo said. “Lots of gullies and bluffs, thick brush, rocky ground, and plenty of snakes and scorpions, although we shouldn’t have to worry about varmints like that at this time of year.”
Brubaker snorted and said, “What’s it good for? From the sound of it, not much.”
“Some of the valleys are fertile enough for farming, or at least they were before this drought,” Bo explained. “For the most part, though, it’s ranching country. Longhorns are hardy enough that they do well just about anywhere. There are quite a few spreads scattered through the hills. Over time there’ll be more. It wasn’t that many years ago that the Comanches represented quite a threat. Anybody who tried to settle west of the Brazos River was running a mighty big risk. Plenty of ranches were raided and burned out.”
“Folks kept moving in out there anyway, though, didn’t they?”
Bo nodded. “That’s what people do. Pioneers, anyway. They push out ahead and make their own way.”
They spent the second night in Weatherford, in a small hotel on the courthouse square, and when Bo woke up the next morning, the first thing he heard was the wind howling outside the window. Thinking that a blue norther must have blown through, he got up and pushed back the curtain, expecting to see a gray, leaden sky that held the threat of snow.
Instead he blinked at the bright sunshine that flooded in through the window. The sky was a cloudless, brilliant blue. The U.S. and Texas flags flying from a flagpole on the courthouse lawn stood straight out in the hard wind, snapping and popping as the gusts caught them.
Bo got dressed and went downstairs to the hotel dining room to find Brubaker already there, sipping coffee.
